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More about a felt shift. Focusing feels good. When that easing comes. Thinking vs focusing. Relaxing
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More about a felt shift
Throughout focusing steps, a “felt shift, " or " release, " may occur. This is the bodily sensed change or " give" in what starts as a tight, tense, bad feeling.
A felt shift is what you're after. It is the actual experience of change in what was stuck, unclear, incomplete. You know something good happened. Often that's the same moment as you get the exactly right words, or when a feeling becomes sharp and located, but the understanding isn't mainly what you're after, it's a by-product. What you want is the concrete way you feel to shift, release, ease.
After a felt shift, again sense what the feeling is now like, and if the release is not complete, feel into what's now still off.
Since a felt shift isn't always going to come, and since you can't will it or make it come, it's not what we call a " step, " like the six steps of focusing. The felt shift can come at any of these steps.
It is important, however, to expect and wait for, and sense, such a felt shift, so that you are guided; you know that all you think and say isn't it yet, if there is as yet no felt shift.
Focusing feels good
If you are making yourself feel bad, you're not doing it exactly right. Focusing feels like a release, an easing, (like going to the bathroom, or like remembering at last something you had forgotten and struggled to recall, or like letting yourself be cared for and leaning up against someone when you wanted to do that, like getting into a bathtub after a tough day).
If it doesn't feel like that right away - it is important to expect it to feel that way, to wait for something that will feel like that. Set your body to wait for, and look for, a step which will feel like that.
When that easing comes
When a feeling comes, which is the one that makes the trouble, or which is the one that has in it the reason why there is still the trouble, the one that's in the way of everything being OK, then the rest of your body feels a release, a relaxation that comes from recognition. Instead of feeling vaguely
tense all over, your body relaxes and only this feeling, right in the middle, is the tension. One eases. There is a kind of " Oh, THAT’s the way it feels”.
This happens, often, before one knows what the feeling is. It's just that one.
If one loses hold of “that” feeling, the overall tension comes back, and is uncomfortable. Getting back in touch with " that" feeling brings the easing back. " Oh yeah, that's the feeling, ” one says. It feels better in one's whole body, to get into touch with the specific feeling, to have it form clearly, even if one doesn't like the feeling itself.
Similarly, when the feeling " opens up" so one can see what it is (for instance, " Oh, scared, that's what the feeling is, I'm scared. " Or, " Yeah, I'm hurt because they saw me that way, yeah, that's what that is…”) one feels an easing, even though one may not at all like what it is.
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Thinking vs focusing
Just thinking these things, or just suspecting them, if one guessed them ahead of time, does not feel good, doesn't have the release. When we think things of ourselves that we don't like, then they make us tenser, more uncomfortable. Therefore, most people think that to really get in touch inside with what they
suspect is there would feel worse. But it feels better. That's how you can tell what’s true. You can tell it's true because even though what it is is something you don't like, your whole body feels overall much better, more alive, energy returns, you feel like you're all OK except for that located spot, that specific thing.
If you don't do the focusing rightly, you may just be telling yourself bad stuff about yourself and making yourself feel bad. It doesn't help just to insult oneself and tell oneself all kinds of bad things. Even if they're true in general, that doesn't change or release anything.
Therefore, set yourself to expect a physically felt step that feels good, releasing, and then wait. Let what you feel form, and come before you, and open up. As it opens to let you know what it is, you will get the felt release.
Relaxing
To focus, it helps to try to relax, to be willing to relax. (If you find you aren't willing, see what this unwilling feeling feels like, what's in that. ) If you are willing to relax - we mean relax inside you - relax the way your body feels from the inside, then the following sequence happens:
You relax, but some part of you doesn’t. You can then feel the part of you that doesn't relax. It will be something specific, even though at first you cannot see what it is, but there it is. At first it will be just there, it will be some tension, or rattlement, or knot in your gut, or whatever and however you feel that.
Stay with that (or if your mind wanders, do the sequence again, and what doesn't relax will be there for you again. ) After a little while (about a minute) it will open up and you will see some of what it is.
Don't tell it what it probably is. Wait for it to tell you what it is.
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